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SF’s tense Yuletide in 1941: wartime footing, evacuees and vigilance

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Evacuees from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in the days following the attack that drew the U.S. into World War II. The date of the photo is unknown.
Evacuees from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in the days following the attack that drew the U.S. into World War II. The date of the photo is unknown.San Francisco Chronicle Archive/The Chronicle

The holiday season hardly felt like a time for rejoicing in 1941. Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor just 18 days before Christmas, thrusting the United States into World War II. Newspapers normally fill their Dec. 25 editions with seasonal feel-good stories, but this year was anything but normal.

Readers opened their Chronicle on Christmas Day to find a front page photo of a ship and the headline, “The Victim of a Jap Sub.” The story began, “A Japanese submarine with a false fishing boat superstructure showing, snaked close to the California shore yesterday and sent a torpedo crashing into the side of the 5,696 ton American freighter Absaroka.”

Hundreds of people on shore saw the attack in the Catalina channel, The Chronicle reported. The badly damaged ship was towed to shore.

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There was a local connection. The lone seaman killed in the attack was 67-year-old Joseph Ryan, who lived in a hotel at 607 Montgomery St. Ryan was trying to save another crewman who had been thrown into the sea by the explosion when a load of lumber fell on him.

San Franciscans didn’t know it, but the Japanese navy had planned to give them a Pearl Harbor-style Christmas present. The Japanese submarine that torpedoed the Absaroka was one of nine that were dispatched to the California coast in the first weeks of the war to attack U.S. merchant ships. Between Dec. 18 and 24 they attacked eight vessels, sinking two.

As a climax to the operation, around midnight on Christmas Eve the submarines were supposed to surface and shell San Francisco and other cities with their 5.5-inch deck cannons. The Japanese military called off the plan because of fears the submarines would be detected in advance, although one one sub did shell an oil refinery near Santa Barbara two months later.

The war did come home to San Franciscans that Christmas, in a painful and dramatic way that no one present would ever forget. As related in an earlier Portals, a convoy of camouflaged ships carrying wounded evacuees from Pearl Harbor steamed through the Golden Gate early Dec. 25.

Thousands of people, many of whom still did not know if their loved ones had survived the attack, streamed to the closed-off Embarcadero. The Red Cross and other service organizations handed out toys to the displaced children and provided evacuees with housing. The wounded were loaded into ambulances and taken to the naval hospital at Mare Island.

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As for the larger war, the news was mostly bad that winter. The Chronicle’s lead headline on Christmas screamed, “SHOWDOWN FOR MANILA! The Battle for the Philippines. 100 enemy troop transports infest island waters; MacArthur leaves to take command in field.”

The story tried to sound upbeat, but it was clear that the military situation was grave. The next day, the paper reported that Manila had been declared an “open city,” meaning all defensive military operations had been suspended to protect the civilian population. Japanese forces occupied the Philippines capital a week later.

The San Francisco Chronicle front page for December 25, 1941, just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor
The San Francisco Chronicle front page for December 25, 1941, just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor

Small items in The Chronicle’s Christmas edition reveal a city doing its best to shift to the new wartime reality.

Residents were still learning the new blackout regulations: A small, boxed story at the top of Page One, headlined “The Signals,” described the different siren blasts that would sound for “Blackout” and “All Clear.” On Page 8, a story headlined, “Tree Lights Must Be Off When You’re Out,” reminded readers, “There’s no Christmas truce in the war and orders to blackout come without warning. … Air raid wardens are empowered to break into houses in a blackout if lights are on and owners not home.”

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Another story reported that local engineers and architects were mobilizing to help people build bomb shelters in their backyards. In the classifieds, there were 15 ads for “blackout materials and air raid supplies.”

The war affected every aspect of local life — even on Alcatraz.

A story headlined “War Dangers at Alcatraz are Studied” reported that the federal government’s island prison presented special problems. “Blackouts on the island are considered extremely dangerous,” it noted — but leaving the lights on could make it an easy air-raid target. A well-placed bomb could “loose on San Francisco the group of men held to be the most dangerous in this country.”

Another story, with an accompanying photograph, reported that two of The Chronicle’s reporters had enlisted in the Army Air Corps. One was David Perlman, who had joined the paper 18 months earlier and was going off to work in the public relations office of the West Coast Air Corps Training Center.

Nine years later, Perlman would find his way back to The Chronicle. He went on to become one of the country’s preeminent science reporters, retiring only this past August at the age of 98.

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Naturally, there were numerous stories about the home front. Under the headline “The Red Cross: Final Plans for Most Crucial Drive,” The Chronicle reported that the relief organization planned to raise $50 million in 1942. San Francisco was expected to kick in $800,000 and also increase its blood bank supplies from 35 to 110 pints a day, with 80 pints reserved for the military.

The paper’s somber editorial was simply titled “Christmas 1941.” It began, “For the first time since the Christian world began to fall into worse than heathendom, we can celebrate Christmas this year with full self-respect. For we now believe in peace enough to fight for it.”

The piece concluded, “For (our children) and their children’s children, the world will be what we make it now. Rejoice with them today that at least we have today. And rededicate yourself, in the spirit of the Prince of Peace, to fight now to banish war, and to build later a lasting peace, of right and justice, good faith and good will.”

The war would last 3.5 more years. Every citizen made sacrifices. And many made the supreme sacrifice. Almost 1,900 San Franciscans, from every neighborhood in the city — Hunters Point to Pacific Heights, South of Market to the Sunset — would be killed in the line of duty before the war ended.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

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Trivia time

Previous question: Where is the building used for the exterior shots in the cult classic movie “The Room”?

Answer: On Broderick, between Bay and North Point.

This week’s trivia question: Why were the streets of 1849 San Francisco strewn with shirts?

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.

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